Social media app Bluesky has emerged on top of Apple’s App Store amid a mass exodus from Elon Musk-owned X post the US presidential election.
X rival apps Bluesky and Threads have both risen to ranks #1 and #2 on Apple’s App store following Donald Trump’s victory in the US elections.
Many users fleeing X have complained of the app’s owner supporting Mr Trump and using the platform to campaign for the Republican president-elect as a reason.
Just a day after the election about 115,000 US users deactivated their X accounts, which is “more than on any previous day of Elon Musk’s tenure”, according to a report by web traffic monitoring company Similarweb.
The report also noted that the “web traffic and daily active users for Bluesky increased dramatically in the week before the election, and then again after election day”.
Bluesky, created by the founder and former chief of X – then Twitter – Jack Dorsey, has racked up over 15 million users recently – more than double the number of people using the platform three months ago.
The app looks and works much similar to Twitter with vertically scrolling messages and small round photo avatars for users, and icons showing the number of comments, likes and reposts each post has.
Thousands of people are lining up to join the app daily in recent times.
“Half a million new people in the last day,” Bluesky announced on 17 October.
While about 100,000 people have been signing up to join Bluesky per day since the US election, it still has a long way to go.
The platform still pales in comparison to X’s user base, and currently only hosts about a quarter of the daily active users that Meta’s Threads app has.
Instagram’s Threads owned by Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg is also seeing increasing number of people signing up since Mr Trump’s victory.
Meanwhile X is at a distant 27th place on Apple’s overall ranking of Apps, but holds a first place in the News category where it sees competition from apps of traditional media outlets like the New York Times and The Washington Post.
Since Mr Musk took over Twitter in October of 2022, the company has seen a number of changes, starting a new subscription programme, retiring the platform’s legacy blue check marks, and reinstating controversial banned accounts.
When the Tesla titan took over Twitter, it was valued at around $44bn but a recent estimate by investment giant Fidelity suggests X could now be worth almost 80 per cent less.
